


a king with his paper crown

by hulklinging



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Anxiety, Bees, Character Study, Gen, Insomnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 14:47:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12684039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hulklinging/pseuds/hulklinging
Summary: When he gets above it all, Henrietta looks just like his model.Sometimes, when he can't sleep, Gansey drives.





	a king with his paper crown

Sometimes, instead of carefully gluing cardboard together with exhausted fingers, Gansey drives. 

The Pig has always felt a little off, like the rattling of its parts has somehow gone and left a door out of time ajar. He drives, and sometimes he swears the clock doesn’t even move.

At night, the buzz of lights go quiet, and something in him loosens. It’s still a study in breathing through the hours, but Gansey is a scholar. A scholar with hot glue gun scars on almost every finger now, and he’s ridiculously proud of each one, which is perhaps not healthy but they fill him with the same sense of accomplishment that crew did. Callouses and scars show that he is living, that he is real.

He tightens his grip on the Pig’s steering wheel and he drives. Sometimes he blinks and he is further along than he should be, which should be concerning except that he knows these streets better than he knows anything. He walks his fingers through these streets every night, over maps and the cold floor of his ersatz factory.

He knows people sometimes scoff at his vocabulary, and he tries to put himself in their shoes, hear his voice through their ears, catch the condescension he is accused of. He tries, he does, but his thoughts get tangled somewhere between his perspective and theirs, and in his chest there’s a fear that never quite goes away, that if he ever properly manages to put himself in someone else’s shoes he won’t be able to find his way back to his own.

Streetlights pass, blurring together like a camera’s shutter, click click clickclickclick, images captured faster than human eyes, and he thinks he would perhaps like to try photography, in a different version of this story. One where he has time to try things and fail at them. One where he has his own story to tell, instead of being tasked with uncovering someone else’s.

Gansey drives, and sometimes he feels the pull to escape and he drives up, as high as he can, until he can pretend the tightness in his chest is just the air getting thinner. He wonders what one would see, if they were to do an x-ray of his chest. He’s intimately familiar with the shape of a skeleton, knows how to trace the lines of bones, but it’s the living things he wonders about, everything in between.

Once he had a dream that everything inside him had been replaced by an hourglass, and the sand was soft as silk and fell with such a cacophony that he woke with it still in his ears. He collects loud things - The Pig’s engine roars, Monmouth Manufacturing echoes, Ronan growls and Blue argues and Noah laughs and Adam… 

Adam is intentional in all he does. Even when he is quiet, it’s controlled. When Adam is quiet, there is no room for insects in the margins.

Gansey drives up, until Henrietta shrinks into something manageable, into something he could fit into the palm of his hand and place on his floor, right at the corner before the lights, neat and tidy and faceless. In the dark, features bleed away, and if he takes off his glasses it might as well be an art project, born of insomnia and a need to feel like he can hold something together. Even if it’s just four fake walls on some fake road in some fake town, going nowhere.

The brush of red that dawn gives it all ruins any illusions. The town lives again, the clock moves, the sand runs down. Gansey’s chest aches, and he wonders if this is how everyone feels, watching the sun rise, or if he’s just got a weak heart.

He drives back down, the sound of the Pig not quite drowning out the incessant drone of chitinous wings.


End file.
